Inside the battle between an anti-Putin banker and the firm that produced the Trump-Russia dossier

A fierce, but muted, battle erupted last year between
banker-turned-human-rights activist Bill Browder and the
opposition research firm Fusion GPS.

Fusion is the organization that produced the explosive,
unverified dossier that detailed President Donald Trump's
alleged ties to, and escapades in, Russia.

That battle escalated on Tuesday when the ranking
member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Dianne
Feinstein, unilaterally released the transcript of an interview
the committee conducted with Fusion's cofounder, Glenn
Simpson.

A fierce, but muted, battle erupted last year between
banker-turned-human-rights activist Bill Browder and the
opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which produced the
explosive, unverified dossier that detailed President Donald
Trump's alleged ties to, and
escapades in, Russia.

Ad

That battle escalated on Tuesday when the ranking member of the
Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, unilaterally
released the transcript of an interview the
committee conducted last August with Fusion's cofounder, Glenn
Simpson.

In the interview, Simpson said his work for the American law firm
BakerHostetler - which was representing the Russian holding
company, Prevezon, accused by the US government of laundering
money into New York City real-estate - was focused "on trying to
get William Browder to testify under oath about his role in this
case and his activities in Russia."

Browder, according to Simpson, had told the Justice Department
that the laundered money was stolen from Russia as part of the
tax-fraud scheme that his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, had uncovered
in 2008.

Magnitsky was arrested and imprisoned that year, and Browder's
reputation has become inextricably linked to the global human-rights campaign he
launched after Magnitsky died in prison in 2009. Browder and
other independent human-rights organizations have said that
Magnitsky was beaten to death after he discovered a $230 million
tax-fraud scheme that implicated high-level Kremlin officials.

Simpson told lawmakers in August that Browder would not answer
any of BakerHostetler's questions about Magnitsky and Prevezon's
purported involvement in the tax-fraud scheme. Browder also
evaded subpoenas, Simpson said.

"So we subpoenaed his hedge fund," Simpson told the committee.
"He then changed the hedge fund registration, took his name off,
said it was on there by accident, it was a mistake, and said that
he had no presence in the United States."

Browder, a wealthy investor who renounced his US citizenship in
1998, has characterized Fusion's work for BakerHostetler as a
"smear campaign" and tweeted on Tuesday that Simpson repeated
"old and false Russian government attacks on me and Sergei
Magnitsky."

"He then whitewashes his accused Russian money launderer clients
who received money from the crime Sergei Magnitsky was killed
over," Browder continued.

"Glenn Simpson admits in his testimony to a number of facts that
show he was part of the Russian anti Magnitsky lobbying campaign
in D.C. that were summarized in our DOJ criminal complaint about
his conduct filed in 2016."

A fight over FARA

In December 2016, Browder lodged a formal complaint with the
Department of Justice alleging that Fusion's work for
BakerHostetler on behalf of Prevezon violated disclosure
requirements.

That complaint caught the eye of Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley,
the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who wrote a letter
to then-Acting Deputy Attorney General Dana Boente demanding to
know whether the Justice Department was investigating Fusion for
alleged violations of FARA.

Grassley's interest in the firm wasn't limited to its connection
to the Prevezon case. He also wanted the Justice Department to
investigate Fusion's role in overseeing "the creation of the
unsubstantiated dossier of allegations of a conspiracy between
the Trump campaign and the Russians" - the Trump-Russia dossier
compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele.

Fusion has said that it was hired by an American law firm, which
the firm argues would not put it in violation of the Foreign
Agents Registration Act. Fusion said in a previous statement that
the president's "political allies are targeting Fusion GPS
because the firm was reported to be the first to raise the alarm
over [the] Trump campaign's links to Russia."

Grassley and Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham sent a criminal
referral about Steele to the Justice Department last week asking
officials to probe whether Steele had lied to federal agents
about his contacts with the media. But a spokesperson for
Grassley, Taylor Foy, disputed last year that Grassley's interest
in Fusion is politically motivated.

"Fusion GPS allegedly failed to register under the law for work
it was doing to advance Russian interests by repealing sanctions
against human rights violators, and it was doing this work at
roughly the same time it was producing the unverified Trump
dossier, which relies heavily on Russian sources," Foy said in an
emailed statement.

"So of course it would be relevant both to the committee's review
of FARA enforcement and the dossier," she said.

Fusion has denied that its opposition research against Browder on
behalf of BakerHostetler was an effort to undermine the Magnitsky
Act. The basis for that claim is that Browder was never able to
prove that Prevezon engaged in the tax-fraud scheme Magnitsky
allegedly uncovered.

But Simpson acknowledged during his testimony in August that
BakerHostetler had instructed Fusion to give its Browder research
to the Russian-American lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin. Akhmetshin
then lobbied Congress against the Global Magnitsky Act along with
Prevezon's Russian lawyer - Natalia Veselnitskaya.

Simpson and Natalia Veselnitskaya

Veselnitsksya and Akhmetshin met with Donald Trump Jr., Paul
Manafort, and Jared Kushner at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016.

The New York Times disclosed the meeting last summer, prompting
reporters to scrutinize Veselnitskaya's relationship with Simpson
in an attempt to understand who she is, who she works for, and
who works for her.

Simpson told the committee in August that he had known
Veselnitskaya since 2014, through their involvement with the
Prevezon case, and had known Akhmetshin since he was a reporter
at The Wall Street Journal. Simpson testified that, despite
having met with Veselnitskaya and Akhmetshin both before and
after the Trump Tower meeting to discuss the Prevezon case, he
was not made aware of her rendezvous with the high-level campaign
officials.

"The lane that I was in was the court case and this fight over
whether Browder would have to testify," Simpson said.

Asked about Veselnitskaya in an email last summer, Browder
responded with a PowerPoint presentation that he said highlighted
the role she played in trying to get the Magnitsky Act repealed
in 2016. She had help, the slide deck asserts, from some of the
"best and brightest minds" in Washington, including Simpson.

Browder characterized Simpson as "a bit player" and said his
vendetta was against "Vladimir Putin, who murdered Magnitsky and
covered up the crimes of his officials."

Some, primarily those sympathetic to Moscow, dispute Browder's
story about Magnitsky. People close to Simpson contend he is not
necessarily one of them. Indeed, Simpson told lawmakers that he
was "extremely sympathetic for what happened to Sergei
Magnitsky."

But Simpson and Browder have a somewhat bitter history that has
become increasingly politicized amid the intensifying probes into
Russia's meddling in the presidential election and the Trump
campaign's possible role in it.

Simpson told lawmakers in August that Browder "was willing to,
you know, hand stuff off to the DOJ anonymously in the beginning
and cause them to launch a court case against somebody, but he
wasn't interested in speaking under oath about, you know, why he
did that, his own activities in Russia."

He said Fusion had uncovered evidence that Browder sought to
evade taxes in Russia using "dozens of shell companies in Cyprus
and other tax havens," adding that one of his "interests or even
obsessions over the last decade has been corruption in Russia and
Russian kleptocracy and the police state that was there."

"So I became personally interested in where Bill Browder came
from, how he made so much money under Vladimir Putin without
getting involved in anything illicit," Simpson said. He
characterized Browder's behavior in the Prevezon proceedings as
"a determined effort to avoid testifying under oath," which
included "running away from subpoenas and making "lurid
allegations" against Fusion.

"All of that raised questions in my mind about why he was so
determined to not have to answer questions under oath about
things that happened in Russia," he added.

Browder pushed back on that claim in a tweet on Tuesday: "Simpson
forgot to mention in his testimony-that subpoena was quashed by
the court," he wrote. "He also forgot to mention that I was
scheduled to be a witness for the DOJ to prosecute accused
Russian money launderers (his clients)."